A Nike Award–winning author travels through Eastern Europe, a place littered with the crumbling relics of communism, with inhabitants abandoned and seemingly frozen in time waiting for their future to begin.
Eschewing major European cities, Stasiuk (Fado, 2009, etc.) traveled east from his native Poland into the nearly deserted yet captivating landscapes of places off the usual tourist route, including Transylvania, Moldova, Slovenia, Romania, Ukraine and Albania. Translated from Polish, the spellbinding language captures the author’s piercing insights with painful clarity; Stasiuk refuses to soften what he sees, hears and smells, providing a dynamic postcard of his travels. Readers will be rapidly ensnared by his recounting of a curiously exotic and complex region of the world—villages where, “[i]f you took away the cars, everything would be as it was a hundred year ago,” where “monotony suggests eternity.” Peppered with haunting landscapes, the terrain contains a history of brutal wars and rapacious dictators. Driving through Slovenia, the author came across a dark valley, the largest unmarked cemetery in a country where “in the summer of 1945, Tito’s Communists murdered in this place, without a trial or witnesses, prisoners who had been handed over to them by armies of the Allies.” In Albania, the author encountered a nation lacking the resources to melt down the 600,000 bunkers built between 1944 and 1985, during the regime of Enver Hoxha. “When the highway turned toward Tirana, the bunkers began,” he writes. “Gray concrete skulls, jutting a meter above the ground, gazed with eyes that were black vertical slits. They looked like corpses buried standing.” Whether writing about gypsies, the ancient bond between beasts and humans or the threadbare currency of Moldova, Stasiuk’s language and sharp observations reveal a discerning intellect. A mesmerizing, not-to-be-missed trek through a little-visited region of the world.
Pub Date: June 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-15-101271-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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